Housebreaking (19 page)

“Why would you lie?”

“To make you jealous.”
Here we go again,
he thought.
Lie upon lie, rising like a layer cake.

“Well, it worked.
Aubrey.
That name drove me nuts. Leave it to you to
come up with a name like that. I tried to find her on Google. How many Aubreys could there be in Wintonbury?”

“None,” he said.

“I even downloaded the song. Which came out in 1972, by the way.”

“Oops.”

“You're a terrible liar. You just make it up as you go along.”

A motorcycle went by, racing through its gears, drowning out all other sounds. “Wait a minute,” he said. He lit up a cigarette and took a drag. The motorcycle finally faded into the distance.

He said, “I was pissed off about your divorce lawyer. I couldn't stop picturing him humping you with his hairy back.”

“Your back is hairy too.”

“Not like his. I pictured him like a baboon, thrusting and grinning.”

“Gross. You see? This is what you do to me. You turn me into a crazy person. You get my head spinning, trying to figure out what's real and what's not, until I just about lose my mind.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Isn't it easier to just tell me the truth?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“Don't do it anymore.”

“What?”

“Lie to me.”

“I won't.”

“No,”
she insisted. “Promise me. I want you to think about it. I want you to understand the implications.”

He pondered this for a moment. Could he simply tell Judy the truth? About everything? Always?

“I'm high,” he blurted.

“I know. I knew that immediately. Your voice gets heavy.”

What about Audrey Martin? Should he come clean about that too? If he and Judy were to get back together—and he suddenly found himself hoping they might—then somewhere down the line, today, tomorrow, a year from now, he would slip and it would come out, and Judy would know that he had lied to her two seconds after promising never to lie to her again.
Here goes,
he thought. “You were right the first time. It was her.”

“Right about what?”

“Audrey Martin. The woman I dated.”

“Audrey
Martin
!” she screeched. “Of course! How could I forget that name?
Audrey Martin had the finest ass in high school
. You said that same fucking thing for years. I can't believe you tracked her down as soon as you left me.”

“I didn't leave. You kicked me out.”

“You cheated on me. I still have that Holiday Inn receipt to remind me, in case I ever considered taking you back.”

“Judy, I didn't cheat. I got drunk across the street and checked in to sober up.”

“You're lying again.”

“No. I'm not.”

He could hear Judy pausing on the other end of the line, weighing his words, the tone of his voice. Then she sighed, like she'd made a decision. “Well, that
is
a surprise.”

“You always think the worst of me.”

“With good reason. And I'm supposed to believe that she called you. This Audrey Martin with the fine ass.”

“I didn't have to call her. She moved onto Leonard's street. She and her husband bought the farmhouse on the corner.”

“That old firetrap?”

“Yeah. And I . . . I kidnapped her dog.”

“You did what?”

“Kidnapped her dog so I could meet her.”

Judy snorted. “You broke into her house and took her dog? Are you insane?”

“No, the thing got out by itself. But I saw it and lured it onto my lawn with a turkey leg. And then she came to retrieve the dog.”

“And one thing led to another.”

“Yes.”

She paused, then laughed. “Thank you. For telling the truth. Isn't that easier?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “It is.”

“Are you still seeing her?”

“No. That's over.” As he said it, he realized it was true.

“Did you have sex with her?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

He thought back over the past month—

“Just answer the question,” she said.

“I'm trying to remember.”

“How could you not remember?”

“There were multiple occasions.”

“Now you sound like my divorce lawyer.”

“How many times did you have sex with him?”

“Don't change the subject. Tell me. Five times?”

“More than that.”

“Ten?”

“Closer to twenty, I'd say.”

“Jesus, Benjamin. Twenty times in a month or so? You're such a pig.”

“You asked!”

“Was it good?”

“It was good, yes. But different.”

“Different how?”

“I felt—I don't know—distanced. Like a spectator.”

“That means you didn't care about her. You were just fucking her for the fun of it.”

“If you say so.”

“Don't sound so proud of it. But maybe you finally got her out of your system, Audrey with the fine ass, and all the others too.”

“Anyway, it's over. It sort of ended tonight, in fact. I haven't talked to her yet, but . . .” He hesitated. How much of this truth thing could he do? Judy had been his adviser all those years, she and Leonard. She had always known what to do whenever he got himself into a jam. “Her daughter—she has a seventeen-year-old daughter—”

“You didn't—”

“No. Of course not. Shut up and listen, will you? The daughter showed up at my front door tonight with Myra's sapphire and confessed to robbing me.”

“She was the one?”

“She says she did it, but I don't believe her.”

“Why not?”

“It's a long story.”

“For goodness' sake, Benjamin. Come over. I want to hear this.”

“Are you sure it's not too late?”

“It's not too late. I'll put on the porch light.”

He hung up. He checked his watch:

11:58
P.M.

Monday

November 26, 2007

Part Two

THE MARTIN-MURRAYS

Audrey Martin

The third Saturday of October 2007

IT BEGAN
on a Saturday, she recalled later, the day the electrician showed up at eight in the morning.

Audrey answered the door in her pajamas and slippers, barely out of bed. “Is this a bad time?” he said. He was alone, unannounced, and it seemed, hungover. He had a ponytail, a dented green toolbox, and he reeked of cigarettes. Audrey nearly said,
Of course it's a bad time.
But she needed him. Contractors were like blackmailers; they showed up when they pleased and they demanded however much they wanted. He was the last of the long line of workmen they'd hired that autumn to fix up the farmhouse, and she wanted to be done with them.

She let him in and showed him to the fuse box in the basement. The rest of that morning, she worked in the kitchen, trying to stay out of the man's way. The space was cramped, with only two short rows of cabinets. She unpacked box after box, trying to find a place for everything. A challenge, squeezing their possessions into this smaller house. What to do with all this crap? She'd been tossing out stuff for several weeks, ever since they started the move to Wintonbury, but it looked like she would have to do more. More plastic for the landfills, to float across the ocean, to fill the bellies of sharks. How had they gathered so many
things
in the first place?

Simplify
, the self-help books said.

There was pleasure in divesting; they were right about that. But what would be left after she lugged the boxes of unneeded kitchenware to Goodwill, after she'd tossed away the moth-eaten and unworn clothes, after she'd dragged the old furniture and unused exercise equipment to the curb? And when to stop once you started? Why not give it all away, like the old men in India who one day opened the front door and simply walked down the road to nowhere, leaving it all behind—their homes, everything they owned—with only the clothes on their backs?

Midmorning, Andrew took his place at the kitchen table with the newspaper. “Are there any eggs?” he said.

This meant he wanted a cheddar omelet with green peppers (small squares, thinly sliced). Her husband had rules for everything—how to make the bed, how to clean the lettuce, how much sleep he needed—and any slight deviation could unsettle him. For a strong, athletic man, he could be extremely prissy. Years ago she'd found these foibles cute, like his habit of lifting one eyebrow.

Andrew was a fast talker, a fast thinker, a man who spent half his day barking into the phone. He thrived on argument, on being right; it was what made him good at his job. Law was a profession that rewarded an aggressive temperament, if you didn't burn out. Most of her friends who'd gone to law school had quit their jobs by now, had moved on to less stressful endeavors. Only the true devotees like Andrew kept at it. He
liked
the stress.

When he took the milk out of the refrigerator to add to his coffee, he brought the carton to his nose for a quick sniff, another of his habits. She knew why. She'd seen the old Tudor mansion in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where he'd grown up. For a lovely woman, Andrew's mother had been a sloppy homemaker; she'd let food sit in the fridge and cupboards until rotten, until weevils burrowed in the rice and flour and moths flew out of the cupboards. Andrew would tell these tales at dinner parties to great effect, but Audrey knew the squalid kitchen was anything but funny to him—the filthy pantry, the unwashed dishes and soiled pans in the sink. So Andrew had gone the opposite way; he'd become a tidy, well-organized man. It made sense. So many things finally made sense when you visited someone's childhood home, when you met his parents and saw the rooms where he'd been raised.

“Will she be joining us?” he asked.

“I doubt it,” said Audrey. She left the whisked eggs on the counter to settle for a minute and went down the hallway to Emily's room.

“Breakfast?” she said, poking her head inside.

“No, thanks.” Emily was lying in bed with her enormous stuffed white bear. The room had been painted a fresh white, like the rest of the interior, the floors refinished. Her clothes were strewn everywhere. Her daughter didn't live in a room; she
destroyed
it; she turned the area into chaos. Hurricane Emily, her brother used to call her.

“Are you sure?”

“The smell of burning meat makes me sick.”

“That's soy bacon, not meat.”

“It's gross.”

“Come and sit with us at least. You've been sleeping all day.”

“I'm not sleeping.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

The mattress rested directly on the floor, in the middle of the room. When she was five or six, Emily had pitched headlong out of her four-poster bed during a bad dream, knocking out a tooth, and ever since then she wouldn't use a bed frame or box spring. The walls were bare; she hadn't bothered to hang her framed art prints or photographs of her Denton pals.

“Are you ever going to clean this room?”

“I like it this way.”

“I'll help you. We can do it together.”

Emily rolled her eyes. “Would you please close the door?”

After breakfast Andrew got a phone call to play tennis with some new associate from the office. He raced around the house, gathering his gear. “Where's my racket?” he yelled from the bedroom, then appeared a moment later in the kitchen. “Where's my—?”

“What's the rush? You're making me nervous.”

“Just tell me where—”

“In the garage. In the box marked—”

“Right. I remember.”

A minute later he stuck his head in the doorway, manic-eyed, waving his Wilson. “I'll kick his ass and be back in time for dinner,” he said, by way of good-bye.

“Go already.”

After he raced out of the driveway, she destressed by cleaning the kitchen. She didn't mind the empty motions, the running of the water, the cleaning and scrubbing, the stacking of dishes, the separation of utensils. It wasn't much different from the mind-numbing process of grading undergraduate papers, once upon a time.

A leaf blower roared to life next door. This was just the start of the neighborhood racket, a cacophony of barking dogs and squawking crows, lawn mowers and chain saws that seemed to continue all afternoon. Once some irritant stopped, another would begin. Was there any place as noisy as the suburbs? The leaf blower operated at a deliriously high pitch, cutting through the other sounds. When the clamor died down somewhat, Audrey could actually hear a cardinal chirping methodically in the crab apple tree out front. But then another machine started a few streets over—a wood splitter, perhaps—making a crunching sound, like some giant monster chewing up rocks and gobbling them down, the whole earth vibrating under its feet.

* * *

SHE WAS
from Vestal, a town in western New York that had the distinction of being one of the darkest places in the eastern United States, literally. Only a few other towns in the country, it was said, got less sunlight, and they were nearby—Syracuse, Utica. Her dad drove a truck for the phone company; her mom was a full-time housewife. Mom and Dad, Michael and Audrey. She was the youngest, the wild one, a star soccer player. In ninth grade, she left for Goodwin Academy on a scholarship, the first time she'd ventured away from home. When she was twenty-two, her parents retired to a condominium near Tampa, and her brother fled to the west, settling in San Francisco. After they sold the house in Vestal, Audrey had never had any reason to go back.

When her parents met Andrew, they called him a catch. “Finally,” her mother said, “you bring home someone respectable. A Yale lawyer. Usually it's strays and misfits.” In his crewneck sweater and wool pants, with his fine manners and lawyerly speech, he was all the things her mother wanted for her daughter—stature, security, class. Audrey liked him for a simpler reason: He listened to her. Unlike the poets and pseudo­intellectuals she'd dated, Andrew respected her for her mind, and sought her advice about matters of importance to his career. Later, after her parents had succumbed to long illnesses, their beach condo sold, their
possessions scattered, Audrey wondered if she herself hadn't seen Andrew through their eyes too. Had the small-town girl she'd thought she'd left behind appraised him with a banker's eye, weighing costs and benefits? What else could explain her marrying Andrew, so unlike any other man she'd dated? Yes, they might have been misfits—artists, musicians, academics—but they were interesting misfits. Andrew was consistent, above all else. Consistent, thorough, predictable.

After she married, her sphere of acquaintances slowly diminished. All of Andrew's friends were lawyers, whether young and handsome or old and garrulous, and they all uttered variations on the same themes: money, expensive toys, envy, contempt. Andrew's clients were middle-aged white men, bald and potbellied, the management sector of corporate America. That was his job, protecting the bosses against their sexist and racist practices, shortcutting on taxes, cheating workers out of pay. Most of the time Andrew got them off the hook, at three hundred bucks an hour, the money their family had lived on for the past twenty years.

She had chosen this life freely, so why did she feel tricked? As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, when she was feeling mischievous or wanted to make her mark, she had a statement she used to write on bathroom walls and sidewalks:
To exist is to be spellbound.
She couldn't remember who'd said that, but she had always made an effort to live true to the dictum. During her junior year, she spent Christmas vacation in Middletown. She'd told her parents she had rehearsals for an Ibsen play. She didn't tell them that she was sleeping with her drama professor, a Harvard PhD who wore his hair in a ponytail halfway down his back. Every New Year's Eve he hosted a bacchanalia called the cannabis cup, where prizes were awarded to guests who brought the most uncommon contraptions to smoke marijuana—bongs and pipes, hookahs and other machines without names. Audrey had been one of the few undergraduates at the party, the recipient of inordinate faculty attention, and it had seemed correct to her then that she held that special honor. These days Audrey often castigated her daughter for her risk taking, yet how much like Emily she had been then, how willing to embrace everything that offered itself for her amusement or pleasure.

When she married Andrew, she hadn't intended to give up her career. But teaching composition on a 4/4 schedule for two years at Woodbridge
Junior College cured her of any enthusiasm for academia. When Andrew got his job at the firm in Stamford, making three times her salary, he said, “You should quit. Stay home. Have kids.”

“Why don't you quit
your
job?” she shot back, bristling, her feminist streak fully engaged.

“You come home every night exhausted and irritated,” he responded calmly. “I'm suggesting this for you. For your well-being.”

She took a few days to think it over. He was right about her mood. She was smarter than anyone in her department, and they'd put her on the
parking committee
. She'd reached the point of disillusionment. She had intended to wait until she was thirty, but entrenched in Cos Cob, there seemed no reason to delay. Why not try something new, to deflect herself from the sameness of her surroundings? What were the suburbs for, if not raising children? She wasn't working on her doctorate; she wasn't doing much of anything but cooking and going to the gym and waiting for Andrew to come home and eat his dinner.

The children were born almost exactly a year apart. And suddenly the smallness of her life didn't concern her; she was too busy and too tired to notice. Daniel was a chess champion in the sixth grade, a tennis prodigy at fourteen, a rock climber during the fall season in high school. One afternoon she'd stood at the bottom of a sheer cliff, holding her breath, watching him climb with a sure-footed grace. The same night she and Andrew watched an evening performance of a play Emily had written and directed for her eighth-grade drama class, a comic retelling of the life of Sappho. These two lives she had created: Audrey couldn't help feeling proud of them, discussing their accomplishments with her husband. She volunteered at the library and women's shelter, and wrote a weekly column on culture for the local newspaper, but her children were her real work, her foremost achievement. She didn't like to admit this, but it was the truth, and she qualified it only by reminding herself that there would be time for herself
after,
when they didn't need her as desperately, when her motherly debt was mostly paid. It was a sacrifice, sure, but not that dire, as sacrifices go. She loved them helplessly and was happiest having them at the center of her world, but this did not keep her from wondering whose world
she
was the center of. Not Andrew's, certainly. He had always been the star of his own movie, and he considered her his
supporting
actress, at best.

As kids, Daniel and Emily were inseparable. They shared a bedroom until they were ten and eleven, because they wanted to. She would hear them late into the night, talking, scheming. They would sit side by side on the couch, reading the same Harry Potter book. They'd often seemed inscrutable and wondrous to her: They had the same dark eyes, the same smile.
Black Irish, the both of them,
Andrew had once said,
like your grandmother Edna
. Audrey supposed she could see the resemblance in ancient photos, a girl posing in a large wicker chair, peering down through the generations, but Edna didn't have the same powerful beauty as Audrey's kids. Sometimes, at a glance, she'd mistake one for the other. Even as they entered high school they stayed as close as always. Coming home after school, the two would gather in the den or up in the attic, where they'd made a sort of parlor in one corner, and discuss their experiences of the day and do their homework together.